Python Practice, and trying not to feel old. Today I Learned: Wednesday 15 June 2022

• Still working through Codecademy's Python 2 course.

  • while loops are similar to if statements.

  • They will continue to loop while the condition is true.

  • while/else loops will execute the else block once the loop condition evaluates to false.

  • A trailing comma (,) after a print statement in a loop seems to force text to be printed out horizontally. If the trailing comma is left out, it seems to print on anew line for every character.

  • The 'zip()' function is used to iterate over two lists at once.

    • Here is it used in a for loop:

      • for a, b in zip(list_a, list_b):

  • When working with booleans, it is important to capitalize the first letters from 'True' and 'False'. Python will not recognise 'true' and 'false'.

  • 'list' is a reserved name, you cannot name a variable 'list'.

  • I got stuck for an hour on their factorial calculation practice:

    • https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-python/lessons/practice-makes-perfect/exercises/factorial

    • I was trying to use str(), map() and list(), combined with for and while loops. No joy.

      • Eventually I tried using range() and it worked out.

        • def factorial(x):

        • factorial = x

        • for n in range(1, x):

        • factorial = factorial * n

        • print factorial

        • return factorial

        • factorial(5)

      • It will take me some time to wrap my head around lists starting the index at 0.

      • The next practice was for testing if a number is prime:

        • https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-python/lessons/practice-makes-perfect/exercises/isprime

        • Pretty frustrating. Turns out by errors were down to improper indentation.

          • Indentation is important in Python, I'll be sure to keep and eye on it now.

  • Codecademy's in browser compiler is frustratingly slow.

  • Python 'if' conditions must repeat the ternary operator everytime when checking string comparisons.

    • eg. if x == "apple" or "orange":

      • This wont work.

      • I will need to put:

        • if x == "apple" or x == "orange"

  • When using the .find() function, it will return -1 if the word not found.

    • sentence = "What is the story?"

    • sentence.find("word")

      • This will return -1, since the string "word" is not found within the string name 'sentence'.

• Currently watching this video and trying not to feel like I wasted my youth with videogames:

  • https://youtu.be/ksvfOrAMj-I

  • I learned to spin up a server with flask, you need to enter 'run flask' into the terminal.

    • I was confused about that when doing the flask RESTful tutorial from a few days ago. I'll take a look at that tutorial again now.

  • 'Jinja' is some sort of tool to render images in HTML.

    • Supposedly when you use Jinja, you need to use double curly braces {{}}

  • Startbootstrap.com is another site with free bootstrap templates.

  • I just heard 'dist' mentioned again. I still don't know what that is.

• Again, I need to reiterate how frustrating codecademy's IDE is. Often times when I run some code, I receive the error: "Oops, something went wrong. Try again"

  • If it was some error with compiling on their end, thats fine. However I would like it if they specified that, as opposed to me guessing if there's something wrong with the syntax of my code.

  • Usually, to fix this problem, I need to copy the code, reset the workspace, and paste the code in, and run the code.

  • This is frustrating when trying to debug.

Thanks for reading about my day, Niall Harrington